The New Tetris

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Block stacking never looked so good on the N64. The New Tetris has new multiplayer screens.

By IGN Staff

The New Tetris for the N64 should be a wonderful update to the original with a variety of different gameplay modes and features. The original Tetris, in all it's forms, definitely required a lot of skill and concentration to succeed. In fact, you would've thought that the skills acquired could be applied to real world situations like split-second problem solving or on-the-spot architectural engineering. Instead all you got from being good at Tetris was a blistered thumb and an earful from friends and relatives who called you a loser for staying inside all day playing "that damn game!" Or, were we the only ones who got that?

After it finished the interesting 3D Tetris update Tetrisphere, Canadian developer H20 Entertainment started work on another 64-bit puzzle game based on Pajitnov's million-seller.

Instead of going for yet another Tetris incarnation with a few new pieces and changing backgrounds, the designers over at Blue Planet and H2O sat down and came up with graphics that are more fitting to the power of a 64-bit system. Of course, the classic 2D gameplay remains intact. You still drop geometric pieces from the top of the screen and try to complete lines at the bottom, but The New Tetris introduces a new reward system and promising mulitplayer modes.

While it's been beaten to the punch by Seta's title, The New Tetris offers up to four players the opportunity to square off in a fast battle mode. Players win by scoring lines that then add garbage to the opposition thus making it harder for them to keep up with the falling blocks. In three- and four-player mode the garbage can be directed as the player desires, opening up the mean (fun) possibility of ganging up on one particular player.

With both single player and multiplayer, The New Tetris can be played in Marathon, Sprint or Ultra modes. Marathon is basically the classic Tetris with the game playing for as long as you can stop the screen from filling up. In Ultra mode scores are calculated depending on how many lines are cleared per minute. In multiplayer Ultra the rate of scoring can be handicapped so that players of different skill levels can play in a more competitive match. With Sprint, a Time Attack of sorts, the game lasts only three minutes with the object to clear as many lines possible.

The end result of all this mad line scoring is that you accumulate points towards building a 3D replica of eight beautifully rendered Wonders of the World. Each reward will cost twice the amount of the previous one. Points towards rewards can also be earned through the multiplayer games with winner-takes-all scoring.

The developers also added a few new scoring options, with bonus points available for creating 4x4 squares composed all of one type of block. Gameplay also has some new options with the ability to hold one block in a side box until a spot opens up to use it.

But the best feature of The New Tetris promises to be in the sound and music department. The composer behind the excellent techno soundtrack of Tetrisphere, Neil Voss (interviewed last year on IGN64), is again powering up his synthesizers and sequencers to show what's possible on the N64.

IGN64 had a chance to play a little of The New Tetris and the multiplayer looks to be a whole lot of fun. Proficiency in the classic Tetris will make any player especially dangerous as they find new ways to frustrate their buddies. With the success of party games where multiplay is the only way, The New Tetris will fit in nicely with players who want a more cerebral way of whooping on their friends. Some great trash talking and classic thumb blisters should also be in order for the rest of us.

Outlook It's been a while since we've heard great music in the line of Tetrisphere on the console, so we're really looking forward to The New Tetris. On the gameplay side, probably the best thing The New Tetris has going for it is that it does not really try to radically alter the original concept of the classic game. The Seta-published Tetris 64 (Japan only) is one of the most-played games in the office, thanks mostly to its vintage gameplay and incredible four-player mode. After having witnessed H2O's talents with Tetrisphere, we're sure this one will be the Tetris game to get.